A portfolio of my past writing, and new stories as I develop them. Almost always deliberately funny.

Friday, July 29, 2016

When the whirring stops: the death of the VCR

The ancient top-loader. Pure steampunk.

The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video
Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s
over.

The first videocassette recording of a film was released in
1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording
tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the
VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,”
was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased
entirely.

Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that
is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology.
Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and
the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the
word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.

VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of
understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas
on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films
been found, easily accessible in the open market.

We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the
market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter
films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of
the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!)
at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our
family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.

Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were
good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the
first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and
old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas
movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every
Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems,
making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting
through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,”
or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War andPeace,” through the incessant
interruptions of commercial blocks.

The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for
decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and
gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape.
(We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.

The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us
ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to
see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing
schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the
movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the
introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the
big studios after World War II.

All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained
into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate
about the length and breadth of cinema.

The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably
difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the
clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and
stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the
period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)

As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale
picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story
for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of
low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and
direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as
always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along,
and thrived as well.)

The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image,
searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every
film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of
multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads
of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and
blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)

Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD
and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD)
rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing
kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself
becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17
percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary
access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible,
but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption,
damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.

And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very
consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated
viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with
the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of
playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from
scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are
comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.

Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s
brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with
Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph
Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized
project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points
the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.

The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
episodes. Of course. Keep.

A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel
and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup
comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers
Superman cartoons. Keeper.

And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family
was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have
dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of
these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape.
(A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my
youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are
hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained,
and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her
clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo
clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.

The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new
technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of
recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is
loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a
duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me,
my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the
years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a
medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry.

About Me

This award-winning independent writer and editor returned to the place where he grew up after years as a wandering comedian. It's beautiful here. He served in a variety of capacities for the Boulder International Film Festival from 2006 through 2014. His writing portfolio includes stories written on topics ranging from grand opera to midget wrestling, for a diverse array of magazines, newspapers and websites worldwide -- including Film International, Westword, Boulder Magazine, Power Pickin', Parterre, Understanding Our Gifted, Movie Habit, Backstage, Muso, 5280, EnCompass, Senses of Cinema, Boulder Jewish News and . . . Philly Sports Faithful, for some reason. Also poet, playwright, screenwriter, blah blah blah. Check out his work at brad-weismann.com, filmpatrol.com and obitpatrol.com.

PM Dawn; Of the Heart Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Ramones, Ramonesmania

Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver

Richard Pryor, Wanted

Richard Thompson, Henry the Human Fly

Robert Klein, New Teeth

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma/Carousel/The King and I

Roger Miller, The Return of Roger Miller

Rolling Stones, Some Girls

Shostakovich, Symphony #4 - Inbal, Wiener Symphoniker

Sibelius, Symphony 5 (final version) -- Vanska, Lahti Symphony

Sly and the Family Stone, Anthology

Steeley Dan, Pretzel Logic

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

Stravinsky, Les Noces -- Bernstein

Strength in Numbers, The Telluride Sessions

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

The Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio

The Kinks, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One

The Mothers, Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets

The Mothers, We're Only in It for the Money

The Velvet Underground & Niko

Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club

Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner

Uncle Earl, Waterloo Tennessee

Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision

Village Music of Bulgaria/Bulgarian Folk Music

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons -- Zuckerman

Was (Not Was), Born to Laugh at Tornadoes

Ween, Chocolate and Cheese

Willie Dixon, The Chess Box

Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie

XTC, English Settlement

" . . . you've got to stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human personality, because I think that's constantly threatened . . . People do have imagination and sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition." -- John Read

"To disseminate my subjective thoughts and ideas, I stealthily hide them in a cloak of entertaining storytelling, since the depth of my thinking, shallow at best, might be challenged by erudite experts." -- Curt Siodmak